Salem Witch Trials

Colin Espiner, Political Editor at The Press, has blogged on an amusing Hollow Man song, but more pointedly on the TVNZ beatup last night, which I blogged on this morning.

Colin takes a similiar view to myself:

On another issue, is anyone else puzzled by TVNZ’s lead story last night? Two National MPs, Lockwood Smith and Maurice Williamson, allegedly don’t “believe” in climate change. What? Quelle horreur! Have them arrested at once! Surely this is a hanging offence now in this country?

For a start, I’d be amazed if the Right-leaning and ultra-dry, cynical and conservative Locky or Maurice did accept the science behind climate change. Not that TVNZ had any proof of this, besides the pair’s refusal to state on the record that they were “believers”.

It has been going around the traps that both MPs have made scoffing noises at a couple of private gatherings about climate change. But so what? Both told TVNZ they accepted and supported National’s party policy, which is that climate change is a real and present danger. So what’s the problem here? I’d be staggered if all 48 National MPs did accept climate change. After all, Key himself is a relatively recent convert.

David Parker, the Minister Responsible for Climate Change Issues, has put out a braying release this morning taunting National for having a couple of MPs with the temerity to suggest his portfolio is not as important as he would think. He should be careful. I’d be equally staggered if every MP in the Labour Party accepted climate change either. In fact, I can think of a couple of names off the top of my head who I’m pretty sure think it’s a load of bunk.

Isn’t it interesting the religious overtones that have crept into this debate? We talk about “believing” in climate change, and having “converted” to it. It’s like a new branch of Scientology.

Personally I accept the weight of scientific opinion that the planet is warming, and that human activity is at least partly responsible. I am, however, unclear as to whether the efforts being made to date to mitigate this are anything more than political tokenism and window-dressing.

I also defend the right of Lockwood Smith and Maurice Williamson to remain dubious about it. I just wish they’d have the guts to say it in public.

Salem witch trials, anyone?

Colin has been blogging for a while now and he is often forthright in putting forward blunt opinions on how he sees things. That’s the whole point of blogging.

What is somewhat noteworthy on this issue, is that the journalist who fronted the TVNZ story is One New Political Editor, Guyon Espiner,. As many know, Guyon and Colin are brothers. Now I don’t point this out to embarrass or cause hassles for either of them. I respect both Espiners for the jobs they do (while reserving the right to criticise on individual stories).

I just think it is a healthy sign that the sibling relationship didn’t stop Colin from stating his disagreement with the TVNZ story. And that is not to suggest that he has done so in the past – it is just the first time I can recall a fairly direct (albeit unnamed) criticism in such a situation.

Labour’s attacks on John Key and various National MPs for not believing in climate change are interesting, but ultimately a bit of a sideshow. It doesn’t matter whether Cullen and his team believe in climate change or not if their actions are not doing anything to address the problem. Believing is a relatively easy step to take given there is a global scientific consensus that climate change is happening and is caused by humans.

Cullen and Clark can talk about sustainability and carbon neutrality as much as they like, but they are currently responsible for an increase in coal mining, dairy conversions and carbon emissions. Greenpeace says that their own target for the acceptable level of global warming is not low enough. On this issue Labour’s record is not significantly different than National’s.

Indeed. The percentage increase (which Kyoto is based on) of greenhouse gas emissions for NZ under Clark has been higher than for the US under Bush and Australia under Howard.

colinm

Paul.
You wrote “National is about to borrow to pay for tax cuts…”.
Where did you get this little snippet of information? Could you cite some links or similar to show that this assertion is true please?

Andrew W

Deity, the point I’m making is that 10 years is too short a period of time to claim a change in a climate trend, the noise levels are high enough over such a short period to hide long term trends. That’s not a new claim, it’s been around decades, it’s why 30 years is the standard time period for measuring climate.

I guess that, even with the use of pictures it’s something you’ll never understand.
Those with closely held religious convictions such as yourself have always resisted the change forced by the better understanding resulting from the scientific method.

Captain Crab

jafapete

David Baigent Add karma Subtract karma +0 Says: April 3rd, 2008 at 8:41 am: “Paul said this word 26 times and counting.”

Actually, Paul had only (cough) used the words arrogant and arrogance 7 times by the time buggerlugs said he’d used them 20 times, so the total is nowhere near 26. But 7 times was probably too many, even given the provocative tone of the climate change deniers.

Your question about when will “the average winter time temperature become equal to the average summertime temperature” is so inane and bereft of even a fundamental understanding of the science involved that one can only assume that it is a deliberate attempt to again derail what finished up last night as a fairly civil and constructive debate. I hope Paul treats your disingenuousness with the contempt it deserves and ignores you completely.

virtualmark

PaulL … enjoyed your long post about climate change. I count myself in a similar camp … climate change seems to be a continual process across history, and I wonder whether at the moment we aren’t guilty of taking a very short term view of it (in global timescales). I find the science that suggests climate change is due to human actions to be unconvincing – as recent developments such as the Aqua satellite are highlighting. And even if it is human actions that are causing global warming I suspect it’ll be cheaper and easier for us to adapt to it than to try to reverse it.

Paul … I too have spent a lot of time living in Vancouver, and I agree their public transport system is a night and day comparison to anything in New Zealand. But, too be fair, my experience has been that it’s a night and day comparison with any other mid-sized global city’s. Certainly, if Auckland had a public transport system that was as integrated and effective as Vancouver’s then many of Auckland’s traffic woes would fall away. But I really don’t think it’d make any difference to our environmental position. Visual pollution sure. Quality of life too. But you’d just be exchanging emissions from cars for emissions from more & larger buses, trains & ferries.

David Baigent

jafapete

Unwilling. As I said, the question is “inane and bereft of even a fundamental understanding of the science involved”.

To put it another way, since “the average winter time temperature” does not need to “become equal to the average summertime temperature” for irreversible changes in the earth’s climate to occur, your question is no more than an irrelevant provocation. It is fatuous.

labrator

it is a scientific debate hijacked by the right to protect corporate interests

Protecting corporate interests? If environmentalists changed the playing field so that it was in businesses best interests to improve and protect the environment then you would see change. Businesses have fiduciary duty to their share holders to make money, in the USA atleast if companies spent money unprofitably and unnecessarily then the could be sued. If you think that this is a right wing conspiracy and name call accordingly then it is equally fair for right wingers to call “greens” names too.

The solution to that is to make them [poor countries] rich

This is a nice idea in principle. However the earth (as a whole) is not currently managing it’s resources efficiently and renewably enough to maintain first world standards for all of the third world population. If China alone was to achieve first world status for it’s people, the increase drain on the earths resources would be equivalent to a doubling of the earths population. This is because first world people consume so much more than third world people do. This is not to say we can’t achieve better living standards across the world but we cannot wholesale adopt our current firstworld standards to everyone. Something has to bend whether it be our standards or the quality of the earth.

I cannot recommend enough Collapse by Jared Diamond. He eloquently treads the line between environmentalists and big business and has real solutions to the problems. No name calling, witch hunts or protest rallies.

Owen McShane

Paul and others,
The private motor car is the most efficient and effective means of transport ever devised when we look at its overall performance.
However, public transport has several roles to play and we need public transport such as taxis, shuttles, buses and planes to address those needs. (trains are essentially obsolete technology in New World cities – New York excepted.
THere are potent substitutions for travel available now such as telecommuting and simply working from home as I do. I commute twenty metres each day from home to my office. (Actually three offices and a sleepout).
People have valued private point to point transport for ever and have used it from the time of domestication of the horse, donkey and camel etc.
Horses use to eat 40% of the grain grown in the US and the food load of horses restrained population growth until the invention of fossil fuels and the motor car. Biofuels are currently a monstrous step backward. Cars cleaned up the air and the streets which used to run with liquid manure.
We will never “run out” of oil (we never run out of anything – it just gets too expensive) but we will find other fuels for our p to p transport if we need to. eg we can use nuclear power and hydro power to electrify the fleet. The technology is all there.
Cities are depopulating and decentralising on average all over the developed world and nothing will stop that because the forces of decentralisation grow by the day – and one of those is our growing affection for nature. I am a good example.
Rubber on road is the solution for urban and rural land transport and HOT lanes deal perfectly with peak hour congestion.
Commuter cars do have a loading of only about 30% while commuting buses at peak hour can have a loading of 40 – 60 percent one way. (They are normally near empty on the way out and start near empty on the way in.) But the whole of day loading of a private car runs between 40 and 45% while the whole of day loading of the bus runs at about 15 – 20%. And buses keep stopping and starting.
The internet, cellphones and GPS are soon going to turn the whole private fleet into a public fleet in highly decentralised areas,
and nothing will touch it.
Finally, many of you confuse pollution with carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide is not a pollutant – it is a colourless odourless gas. If the skies above your head are yellow or brown it is not carbon dioxide. Indeed if your car is emitting excessive pollutants and you tune it up, the pollutants will diminish but the carbon dioxide will increase because of more efficient burning.
Most of those scary photos of “smokestacks” with huge white clouds pouring out are actually cooling towers and the white clouds are – well , white clouds. (condensed water vapour).
Vancouver is very nice but their planning comes at a price – it is the only city in Canada where housing is severely unaffordable. According to the latest Demographia study, Vancouver is the most expensive city in Canada and 15th in the world for housing affordability. Vancouver’s affordability index is 6.6, measured by comparing median house prices to median household income. Anything above 5.1 is “severely unaffordable.” This multiple should not be greater than 3.
NOw I have to go and write about climate change – a term invented by the UN Climate Framework Convention – not the US Republicans.

PhilBest

PhilBest

Thank you for spending all that time on that SUPERB post, Owen McShane. I think the sheer lack of commonsense in the whole public transport and urban planning thing, and the hugely negative unintended consequences, is just appalling.

PhilBest

There is a study somewhere, using data from the US Energy Dept’s “Transportation Energy Data Book”, that shows that on average public transport is about as efficient per passenger mile, as an average 1.8 litre car with one person in it. Almost ALL cars with 2 or more people are more efficient. Smart Cars, small LEV Hondas, and the like, are VERY MUCH MORE efficient.

tom hunter

Apart from all the other similarities with past apocalyptic prophesies there is this aspect:

Here’s Paul…..however it is one of the goals in my life to make sure that the arrogance of others doesn’t leave this world in a place of such disrepair that my kids won’t want to live in it.

and here’s a somewhat more famous namesake:

“I’m scared, I have a 14 year old daughter whom I love very much. I know a lot of young people, and their world is being destroyed. My world is being destroyed. I’m 37 and I’d kind of like to live to be 67 in a reasonably pleasant world, and not die in some kind of holocaust in the next decade.”
– Paul Ehrlich, Look (1970)

colinm

I wonder where Paul has gone?
As soon as someone starts to toss in this sort of one liner (“National is about to borrow to pay for tax cuts…”) in their post, I begin to question the veracity of the rest of the comment. Or, perhaps this is one of the more subtle ways ways of putting out Labour spin, insert the ocaisional one liner like that hoping it’ll register later on.?

labrator

@Tom hunter: Whilst I don’t disagree that there is a lot of scare mongering from environmentalists how can you say that the quote above didn’t actually postively effect some change so what he/she got 30 years later is better than what would happen?

Evironmental warnings have been likened to fire alarms. Much rather the fire alarm went off and it was a false alarm than to not have a fire alarm at all.

PhilBest

A Comparison of energy consumption of
Cars, Transit Buses Rail and air

Based on Table 2.10 from:
The Transportation Energy Data Book: Edition 25 – 2006 ,
a publication prepared for the U.S. department of energy
by the Oak Ridge National Laboratory

Energy consumption of car-bus-air compared

Table 2.10 lists energy consumption of various modes of passenger travel. It shows that modern, efficinet, cars use less energy than rail, transit bus or commercial air. Here are the numbers from table 2.10 and below (btu is British Thermal Units and is a measure of energy):

The car number is an average based on the average current fleet and an average number of passengers. More efficient cars are readily available, for instance the $10,770, 2006 KIA Rio is listed at 32 MPG city. This is 3906 btu/vehicle-mile, or 2488 btu per passenger-mile usning 1.57 passengers per vehicle, only 60% as much energy as a transit bus.

For Portland where we drive alone more, the passengers per vehicle is about 1.3, so the following apply:
With an average of 1.3 passengers, the 2006 KIA Rio becomes 3004 btu per passenger mile which is 26% less energy than Trimet busses per passenger mile. The Honda Insight at 60 MPG city is 2083 btu per vehicle mile (1602 per passenger-mile@1.3passengers), uses less then one-half the energy of a Trimet bus. At two passengers it consumes only 1042 btu per passenger mile – less than 1/3 that of a Trimet bus.

Do high density cities have lower transit energy consumption than the average?

No. See Figure 2.2.

Why do people think that transit buses save energy?

Because they did in 1970, but over the years, buses became less efficient and cars more efficient. See table 2.11.

What about using Europe as a model, they all take transit don’t they?

Figure 3.1 shows vehicles per 1000 people from 1940 to present. It also shows European vehicles per 1000 at two points in time, 1994 and 2004. Viewing the chart, the U.S. has about 750 vehicles per 1000 people while Europe has about 560, or about 75% as many. Interestingly, Europeans have about 75% as much income as we do. They also pay a lot more for fuel.

Conclusion

The most practical way to reduce transport energy consumption is to encourage people to switch to small cars.

It will save more energy than transit and is more likely to succeed in actually reducing energy consumption.

PhilBest

PhilBest

Here’s another really good one:

DOES MASS TRANSIT SAVE ENERGY ?
by David S.Lawyer mailto:dave@lafn.org More articles by D. Lawyer
1996 (Revised 2003, 2006) Shows that the increase in energy efficiency of the automobile after 1970 and the decline of mass transit efficiency has resulted in mass transit being little more energy efficient than the auto. Furthermore, the additional travel engendered by new mass transit systems tends to result in further increased energy consumption. Compares the technologies of the auto to both bus and rail and explains efficiency in terms of the vehicle’s resistance to motion. Previous title: “Why Mass Transit Wastes Energy”.
1. Copyright
2. Introduction
3. From 25 Years Ago to Today
4. Bus vs. Auto
5. Rail Transit
6. Ridership
7. Errors in Statistics
8. Conclusion
9. References & Notes

Copyright 2003 by David S. Lawyer. Feel free to make copies but commercial use of it is prohibited. For example, you can’t (except to an insignificant degree) combine it with advertising on the Internet. Please let me know of any errors or suggestions for improvement.
2. Introduction

The author is an ardent environmentalist and is even more opposed to the automobile than mass transit. The purpose of this article is to inform the public why mass transit, as currently implemented and utilized, unfortunately doesn’t save energy.

Ever since the energy crisis of the early 1970’s, the myth that mass transit saves energy and reduces pollution has been widespread. Tens of billions of dollars of public funds have been spent (and mostly wasted) on subsidizing mass transit. An objective appraisal shows that mass transit today is little (if any) better than the automobile as far as energy use and pollution are concerned…………

SPC

The NBR omits mention of the above research – while including another work which is indicative of negative feedback to global warming coming from cloud cover, which they conclude is reason to be in the climate change camp (those who feel that the prime problem may be climate changes rather than a global warming per se).

Thus if both works are valid then one would surmise that Greenhouse gas is causing global warming (not solar activity) but that because of a negative effect from cloud cover, it might not be as progressive/great a build up of warming as some have feared.